Best Of Tnr 2008: Scandale Francaise

December 28, 2008

Ruth Franklin, reviewing
the life and works of the celebrated French Jewish author Irene Nemirovsky,
discovers that the perception of Nemirovsky as "a great holocaust writer" is
"spin" and "fraud":

The real irony of the Suite
Francaise sensation is not that a great work of literature was waiting
unread in a notebook for sixty years before finally being brought to light. It
is that this accomplished but unexceptional novel, having acquired the dark
frame of Auschwitz, posthumously capped the career of a writer who made her
name by trafficking in the most sordid anti-Semitic stereotypes. As Weiss's
important and prodigiously researched biography makes clear, N